The World Wide Web (WWW) is comprised of an expansive network of interconnected computers upon which businesses, governments, groups, and individuals throughout the world maintain inter-linked computer files known as web pages. Shoppers navigate these pages by means of computer software programs commonly known as Internet browsers. Due to the vast number of WWW sites, many web pages have a redundancy of information or share a strong likeness in either function or title. The vastness of the unstructured WWW causes shoppers to rely primarily on Internet search engines to retrieve information or to locate businesses. These search engines use various means to determine the relevance of a shopper-defined search to the information retrieved.
The authors of web pages provide information known as metadata within the body of the hypertext markup language (HTML) document that defines the web pages. A computer software product known as a web crawler systematically accesses web pages by sequentially following hypertext links from page to page. The crawler indexes the pages for use by the search engines from information about a web page as provided by its address or Universal Resource Locator (URL), metadata, and other criteria found within the page. The crawler is run periodically to update previously stored data and to append information about newly created web pages. The information compiled by the crawler is stored in a metadata repository or database. The search engines search this repository to identify matches for the shopper-defined search rather than attempt to find matches in real time.
A typical search engine has an interface with a search window where the shopper enters an alphanumeric search expression or keywords. The search engine sifts through available web sites for the shopper's search terms, and returns the search of results in the form of HTML pages. Each search result includes a list of individual entries that have been identified by the search engine as satisfying the shopper's search expression. Each entry or “hit” may include a hyperlink that points to a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) location or web page.
Electronic shopping (or e-shopping) has been gaining popularity as the popularity of the World Wide Web increases. E-shopping continues to evolve from a means of providing an easy way of accessing (and publishing) information on the Internet to a virtual marketplace where almost every type of merchandise can be traded, as it is in the physical world. As more retail businesses market their merchandise over the WWW, it will become more important for a business to distinguish itself from the competition. If the retail business has an established brand name, it will have an advantage over strictly Internet retailers when creating a web store. The brand name recognition translates to consumer recognition for an on-line presence, significantly lowering the retail business' cost of entry into Internet retailing, compared to the cost of entry for a competitor that operates solely on the Internet. In addition, it is possible for the retail business to combine the best of Internet retailing with standard retailing by joining its web store's ease of access, ease of use, and significant inventory features with its delivery and distribution channels and proximity of its physical locations to the shoppers. For example, a consumer in a Barnes and Noble store might be offered kiosk access to the Barnes&Noble.com® web site if the consumer is unable to locate a book in the store. Alternatively, a shopper on Home Depot's web site might be allowed to purchase a yard of gravel which could then be delivered to their home from their local Home Depot retail store.
Strictly Internet enterprises might not be able to offer such advantages; however, their advantage over regular retailing competition arises from this very same distinction. Purely Internet enterprises are not encumbered with the expense of running and maintaining costly physical assets such as retail stores, and thus they can devote their attention to improving their customer's Internet or on-line experience. The brand proposition for these strictly Internet enterprises is focused on creating a distinctively better, more complete, and more efficient on-line shopping experience to promote greater traffic to their sites, thus further establishing their brand equity.
Examples of Internet merchants attempting to establish exclusive shopping feature advantages to promote their brands are illustrated for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,960,411 to Hartman et. al, which describes a system that permits a shopper to check out with a single mouse-click, U.S. Pat. No. 5,897,620 to Walker et al., which describes a system that allows a shopper to submit a conditional purchase offer for an airline ticket at a set price and further allows airlines to decide whether to accept or reject the proposed ticket price. Each of these patents evidences the importance that a strictly Internet merchant places on establishing an exclusive, unique shopping experience for its consumers in an attempt to further promote its brand and attract and retain on-line shopping at its web site.
An outgrowth of the popularity of Internet or on-line shopping is the advent of on-line comparison shopping engines. Price comparison tools, often promoted by web portals such as Yahoo!®, or AltaVista®, or shopping services such as Bluefly.com or MySimon.com are essentially web search engines that allow a user to search a population of web merchants for the lowest price for a desired item. These search engines allow a shopper to enter a key word which is usually a description of the desired item. In response to the shopper's query, the search engines return a set of corresponding web-based matches listing the vendors or vendors' web sites that offer the desired item. Typically, these searches are undertaken on an item by item basis and the search is performed against a set of retailers determined by the search engine owner. The population of the merchants searched may be open-ended as in the case of search engines that use agents or “bots” to scan the web for such items or closed as in search engines that search only across a group of subscribed merchants.
The advantage of Internet comparison shopping engines for Internet retailers is the prospect of increased incremental sales as shoppers choose the merchant's products as a result of a favorable price comparison. Unfortunately, this sales increase comes at the expense of web-site traffic. As more shoppers turn to comparison shopping engines, fewer shoppers visit the actual Internet retailer.
Therefore, the Internet retailer loses the ability to generate sales of ancillary items often acquired by a shopper visiting their site and most importantly, the merchant's brand equity and visit or “hit” count at the merchant's web site is eroded. The effort expended on building a unique shopping experience might thus be threatened by the emergence of these one-stop shopping engines. As such, Internet retailers are challenged to address the convenience offered by such tools in such a way that shoppers are still encouraged to visit their web sites.
In response to this challenge, services such as IChoose.com, and Clickthebutton.com® have appeared which permit a shopper to engage in comparison shopping after having identified an item of merchandise to purchase at an Internet retailer's site. In the case of IChoose.com, the price comparison takes place at the merchant's web site. Software is provided to the on-line shopper that detects when the shopper is about to make a purchase and quickly scans the IChoose.com database to provide a last-minute price check for the items being purchased. IChoose.com also offers an analogous product to Internet merchants that detects when a customer is on the verge of exercising the IChoose.com option to leave their site for a better price and lets the merchant counteroffer with a lower price quote to retain the shopper.
There are several disadvantages to IChoose.com approach. The customer has access only to items found by IChoose.com's comparison shopping engine. Depending on the scope of IChoose.com's price comparison, the search engine may miss some merchants and as a result, the customer may not be offered the lowest price available. In addition, the merchant does not know which rival it is bidding against; it simply knows that a customer is about to leave and that it needs to “beat” a certain designated price in order to retain that customer.
Clickthebutton.com® offers a service that is generally similar to IChoose.com. The Clickthebutton.com® software installs a button on the user's computer screen or “desktop”. While shopping in an Internet store, the user may select an item and simply click the button on their desktop, generating a client-based request to a Clickthebutton.com® server hosting a proprietary real time shopping comparison engine. The shopping comparison engine returns to the shopper prices along with pointers to the web sites with comparable items.
The Clickthebutton.com® approach also presents several disadvantages. Since a third party does the comparison-shopping, the customer does not know which merchants the shopping engine checked. As a result, the customer may not be offered the lowest price available for the desired item either because the comparison search was biased toward subscribing merchants or because the comparison search was not comprehensive. In addition, the merchant is afforded no opportunity to counteroffer against lower prices.
In the foregoing examples of current Internet comparison shopping systems, the Internet merchant is not offered significant value by the comparison shopping engine even though the shopper performs price comparisons while at the merchant's Internet web site. Since comparison-shopping is done by an unknown third party that may or may not be performing an unbiased or comprehensive search, the comparison-shopping feature provided by IChoose.com or Clickthebutton.com® might not offer the best possible comparison shopping experience for the customer. In addition, these services present a distinct disadvantage to the merchants because they either do not provide a counter offer option, or only provide the counter offer option based on the limited set of comparison prices generated by the comparison-shopping engine used by these services.
A solution is clearly needed that allows a shopper to leave the merchant's site after filling their virtual shopping cart, then browse the WWW in any way the shopper wishes for a lower priced item. The shopper would still retain the ability to quickly purchase the items in the virtual shopping cart from the original merchant. Additionally, the solution should allow the merchant to counter offer against an identified lower priced item upon request by the shopper. For the merchant's protection, the request should reveal not only the lower price but also the merchant offering the lower price. In addition, the implementation of the solution should be relatively straightforward and easy for the customer to use, while at the same time being vigilant of web-based countermeasures employed by competing merchants. The need for such a price comparison and adjustment system for Internet-based retailing has heretofore remained unsatisfied.